One of my all time favorites.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

"Mary Poppins" director Robert Stevenson's fantasy outing "The Island at the Top of the World" has all the makings of an adventurous outdoors saga, but loquacity between the two leading characters, played respectively by David Hartman and Donald Sinden, sabotaged this formulaic epic. Although Ian Cameron authored the novel "The Lost Ones," Cameron's narrative appears to have been inspired by Jules Verne. Interestingly enough, Cameron is a pseudonym for Donald G. Payne, who also has also written novels under another name James Vance Marshall. The son of Sir Anthony Ross (Donald Sinden of "The Day of the Jackal") vanishes during an expedition two years earlier in the Arctic, and Ross invites Arctic expert Professor John Ivarsson (David Hartman of "The Ballad of Josie") to accompany him on a journey to the North Pole. Although they cannot ply the frozen waters of the Arctic to reach the area where Ross' son Donald (David Gwillim of "Nostradamus") vanished, Ross has found an alternative form of transportation in the form of an airship piloted by French aviator Captain Brieux (Jacques Marin of "Charade") to take them to their objective. Along the way, our intrepid adventurers pick up Donald's Eskimo pal Oomiak (Mako of "Bulletproof Monk") and take him with them to Donald disappeared. Eventually, our heroes find an evergreen section of the Arctic and a graveyard where whales go to die. The whale graveyard reminded me of an elephant graveyard in African movies. Finally, Ivarsson and Ross find Donald. It seems that he is living with a lost colony of paranoid Vikings who abhor the idea of outsiders entering their society. They call their remote outpost Astragard and they have lived there for a thousand years. No sooner have these Vikings greeted our heroes to their colony than they take them hostage, put them on trial—a kangaroo trial—and sentence them to death by immolation aboard a boat in the middle of a fjord. Happily, Donald's attractive girlfriend Frejya (Agneta Eckemyr of "Blindman") rescues them and they embark on a long, arduous journey with the Vikings nipping at their heels.Most of the time, Sinden and Hartman's characters exchange important points of exposition and it almost seems that the movie devolves into a two man drama. "Island at the Top of the World" improves substantially after our heroes escape from the Vikings and literally turns into Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The payoff that enables our heroes to escape from the Vikings is rather cheesy. Sinden is really good as a bulldog of a character and his dialogue delivery is gripping. Hartman delivers his dialogue well enough, but he plays a lifeless character without a shred of charisma. The action seems threadbare and the special effects a rather slight.

THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD is a Disneyfied version of the globetrotting adventure flicks that popped up in the 1970s - a genre that includes personal favourites like THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and many other long-forgotten escapades.This one is a Victorian-set adventure, heavily indebted to the works of Jules Verne, which sees a group of characters using an airship to travel to the Arctic circle, where they hope to track down one of their own who has gone missing. Along the way, they hook up with a friendly Eskimo (played by Japanese actor Mako, no less!) and have a stand-off with a long-lost tribe of Vikings who have lost none of their bloodthirstiness.THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD is a fun and forgettable family adventure film that passes the time amiably enough. There's nothing here that's controversial, just one old-fashioned adventure after another, and thankfully it's not as twee as I'd feared given its Disney pedigree. Donald Sinden is on good form as a pompous aristocrat along for the ride. Part of the fun of watching comes from watching the ridiculous scenarios, like characters being able to outrun lava flows without ever being affected by heat and the like.

does this movie contain a sequence where a map and a "key" is rotated on the map to determine what i remember as a route to somewhere north. i am 41 now and the memory only remains of a map scene and where i saw it. any help will be appreciated. i Saw w the movie i on the main line and i think it was a Disney film, though i could be wrong. Any help finding the title of the movie i seek would be appreciated. not sure about the ten line thing bu i am a newbie and just want to find the title of the movie where there is a part in the beginning of the movie where the main characters use a map and someone rotates a key or thing on the map and lines it up with geography and determines the route or path they must take to get to whatever the movie gets them to.

My dad took me to see this one in the theater back in 1974 when I was 7 years old. It blew me away and helped fuel a lifelong love for adventure/fantasy. Hey, who doesn't like a cool adventure? The story is set in the early 1900's and concerns a rich Englishman who leads a rescue party deep into the Arctic in search of his missing explorer son. They track him to a mysterious lost colony of Vikings that has been cut off from the outside world for centuries. The plot is a fairly typical "Lost World" format: 1/3rd of the movie is spent searching for the lost world, 1/3rd is spent exploring the lost world, 1/3rd is spent being chased around/from the lost world. It's all fairly exciting, but not deep enough to impress an adult viewer. (However, with some deft tweaking this could be GREAT remake material for Disney.) I bought the DVD recently to take a trip down memory lane and I wasn't disappointed. It held up well to my memory. Yes, the effects are dated and some of them are downright terrible, but others are surprisingly good, and overall the film has a wonderful pre-CGI charm. You'll also get vibrant outdoor shots and some of the best matte work you'll find in ANY movie. It's not a bad choice for adventure/fantasy fans looking for family-friendly fare. Probably your only chance to see this film anymore is on DVD. Be sure to get the 30th anniversary edition as it has the extras.